heart of darkness. But his air is
luminous, the logic of his proportion faultless, his synthesis
absolute. Where other painters juxtapose he composes. Despite the
countless nuances of his thin, slippery brush strokes, the picture is
always a finely spun whole.

When Fragonard was starting for Rome, Boucher said to him: "If you
take those people over there seriously you are done for." Luckily
Frago did not, and, despite his two Italian journeys, Velasquez was
not seduced into taking "those people" seriously. His recorded opinion
of Raphael is corroborative of his attitude toward Italian art. Titian
was his sole god. For nearly a year he was in daily intercourse with
Rubens, but of Rubens's influence upon him there is little trace. Las
Meninas is the perfect flowering of the genius of the Spaniard. It has
been called impressionistic; Velasquez has been claimed as the father
of impressionism as Stendhal was hailed by Zola as the literary
progenitor of naturalism. But Velasquez is too universal to be
labelled in the interests of any school. His themes are of this earth,
his religious paintings are the least credible of his efforts. They
are Italianate as if the artist dared not desert the familiar
religious stencil. His art is not correlated to the other arts. One
does not dream of music or poetry or sculpture or drama in front of
his pictures. One thinks of life and then of the beauty of the paint.
Velasquez is never rhetorical, nor does he paint for the sake of
making beautiful surfaces as often does Titian. His practice is not
art for art as much as art for life. As a portraitist, Titian's is the
only name to be coupled with that of Velasquez. He neither flattered
his sitters, as did Van Dyck, nor mocked them like Goya. And consider
the mediocrities, the dull, ugly, royal persons he was forced to
paint! He has wrung the neck of banal eloquence, and his prose, sober,
rich, noble, sonorous, rhythmic, is to my taste preferable to the
exalted, versatile volubility and lofty poetic tumblings in the azure
of any school of painting. His palette is ever cool and fastidiously
restricted. It has been said that he lacks imagination, as if creation
or evocation of character is not the loftiest attribute of
imagination, even though it deals not with the stuff of which
mythologies are made.

We admire the enthusiasm of Mr. Ricketts for Velasquez, and his
analysis is second to none save R.A.M. Stevenson's. Yet we do protest
the pai